Canadian Star is Hospitalized After Cyberbullying and Fake News

Canadian star Saint Von Colucci, real name Erich Saint Colucci Lima, has been admitted to a hospital after a failed suicide attempt caused by his deteriorating mental health due to fake news, conspiracy theories, cyberbullying, and online harassment in the last few months.

The Canadian-Portuguese star has not undergone any plastic surgery and has not passed away.

The artist's and its representative's email servers were hacked last spring and used to send out fake press releases to the media.

Personal information from the artist was also fabricated on those fake press releases sent out to the media in order to harm the artist's reputation.

News about Colucci's alleged death broke out and went viral in the entire world early last year after hackers gained access to Colucci's reps's email servers and impersonated them for journalists.

According to his new managers, the artist was already having a hard time with his mental health while working in South Korea for the last three years.

The artist moved to South Korea and worked there for three years at a music company. He has recently terminated his work contract with the company, citing extreme bullying from his coworkers and discrimination.

According to his managers, the death rumors and conspiracy theories online surrounding his existence were the tipping point for him.

"Freelancer journalists from India and Bangladesh, with the support of media outlets Variety, AI Jazeera, IHeart Radio Canada, and The Indian Express, nearly killed him with their falsehoods and lies about his existence. He was very close to ending his own life because of their crazy conspiracy theories, nearly turning the so-called "journalists" into murderers. Legislation against fake news and the promotion of conspiracy theories in the media shall be imposed around the world as soon as possible, before it's too late. The fact that they knew the conspiracy theories were nonsense and still refused to take down the articles or correct them is just vile. There are evil people in the journalism industry too. He does not want to live anymore. He takes two steps and starts crying. He is in a vegetative stage. The fact they became obsessed with Colucci's modeling pictures on Instagram and were quick to decide they were artificially generated due to his lack of presence online was astonishing. They became obsessed with him, in a very sick way" say his managers.

40-year-old South-Korea-based freelancer British Journalist and aspiring influencer Raphael Rashid, who has been accused of multiple criminal felonies by online social media users in the past, dug the web to find unflattering modeling pictures of an insecure and shy 16-year-old Colucci from a photoshoot done for the online magazine Vanity Teen to share and humiliate him online while falsely accusing him of orchestrating the whole publicity stunt and nearly cyberbullying him to death. The defamatory and petty Twitter thread was shared by many members of the media, including staff from The Rolling Stones India and others. The same journalist harassed the artist and his dying grandmother with cancer for months afterwards.

Besides Rashid, Canadian journalist John R Kennedy from Iheart Radio Canada and Hyusui Kim from Reuters were also amongst those cyberbullying and falsely accusing the star of wrongdoings online.

His manager, Alex Lee, blames the online trolls and those malicious members of the media for causing him trauma.

Lee accuses three specific freelancer journalists from Bangladesh, Canada, and India of engaging in cybercriminal activities, such as doxxing, cyberbullying, defamation, and target harassment, and says those journalists were acting out of malice and personal grudges against the artist.

"When you think of online trolls and cyberbullies, you usually think of teenagers or middle-school children with lots of time on their hands and social media accounts. Never in a million years would you think of grown-ups, 30, 40-year-old self-titled "journalists," digging the web to find modeling pictures of a 16-year-old Colucci, photoshopping them to make them as unflattering as possible, and posting them on their social media accounts just to defame, humiliate, and bully him while falsely accusing him of things and using slurs to dehumanize him. That's just evil. Only low-life adults would do such a thing. That's some Perez Hilton journalism-style", says Alex Lee.

His manager states that he is the most insecure and sensitive boy in the world, and the online trolls and conspiracy theories just made things worse for him.

"He thinks of himself as the ugliest guy out there and has never been in a relationship because of it. His insecurities were at an all-time high while living in South Korea due to their strict beauty standards; therefore, he found peace in using a little bit of Photoshop in his pictures to make them more attractive and artsy, but when the journalists started saying all his pictures were generated by artificial intelligence, that drove his insecurities up through the roof. He will look at his past pictures and not recognize himself anymore. Thanks to them, he is suffering from detachment now", says Lee.

The artist has been in the darkest place of his life in the past few months, according to his managers, but things took a darker turn when he tried and failed to take his own life on Christmas Eve.

The family had found a note he had written and left in his bed saying that the news articles saying he does not exist and he is an artificial intelligence-generated character were too much for him.

Calls and requests from Colucci's PR agency, The Hype Company, for takedowns or corrections to the defamatory and fake news articles about the artist from media outlets Variety, The Indian Express, AI Jazeera, TMZ, and to London-Based freelancer Journalist Hannah Abraham were maliciously ignored and unanswered.

Colucci's family vows to file lawsuits against those online trolls and malicious journalists who started and spread the malicious conspiracy theories and accusations against him.

"The only reason we haven't filed the lawsuits yet is due to his mental health. But we will be filing lawsuits against those individuals and media outlet houses, and "public interest" and "freedom of press and speech" will not protect those cyber criminals from liability for nearly destroying and ending an innocent young man's life. It might take a few more months or three years, but we will be moving forward with lawsuits, and we will see them at the court in the UK. He was a victim of malicious journalism", say Colucci's managers.

Colucci is currently undergoing mental treatment at a hospital facility.

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This release was published on openPR.